by Manny Howard
Following advice from both breeders and chat room experts, I leave the rabbits to acclimate to the hutch. From my observation post at the living-room window I am delighted to observe the buck and his two female neighbors sticking their noses above the wooden section of the partitions dividing their cages, pressing their noses to the wire grates and, their nostrils working athletically, drawing in great snorts of the rabbit next door. This can only be the precursor to extremely enthusiastic breeding. I allow myself to imagine waves of kits reaching five-pound fryer weight in record time, to predict that I will have to find a way to convince fainthearted friends and neighbors to accept the inevitable excess of rabbit meat.
I notice one unexpected behavior almost immediately. Rather than drinking the cool water I supply, the rabbits prefer to vigorously kick over the heavy metal bowls, splashing the water onto the grass on the bottom of the cage, then sit on the puddle. It is late spring, but spring all the same; it hardly seems so warm that the rabbits would need more relief than the HVAC system supplies, but everything I know about a rabbit’s circulatory system I learned while my mother read Watership Down to me during one summer vacation in England. It may have been a mild May, but a giant rabbit’s coat is no joke. Doe #2, the flawless white, seems especially fond of a good soak. Bottom line? The rabbits want to sit in wet grass. What could possibly be the harm?
The hutch complete, my giant breeders acclimated, all that remains is to begin the multiplication process. The predawn hours are optimal for copulation; apparently the same holds true for rabbits. Early each morning I stumble to the coffeemaker, swipe a cup, and deposit the females in the cage of the sand-colored buck, Buck #1. I vary the method of introduction. I vary the order of introduction. I vary the time they spend in the company of Buck #1. I vary the time at which each doe visits Buck #1. Before long the truth is inescapable. My rabbits don’t fuck like rabbits.
For two weeks I stand in my underwear in the predawn, the hour now twice confirmed in e-mails to Sugar Ray to be the optimal hour for breeding, watching while my does reject the most earnest efforts of the big sand-colored buck, my hopes dimming for that late-summer day when freshly butchered, milk-fed fryers hang cooling in the morning air. Standing, dawn after dawn, in the driveway watching two enormous rabbits dry-humping while holding a cooling cup of coffee is a bad way to start the day. It would be for anybody, but I feel my middle age more acutely each morning that my big sandy buck fails to breed.
I am a product of my generation; even as the father of two, I have never imbued sex with a purpose beyond gratification (and that is almost always immediate, if not instant). The sand-colored buck’s inability to propagate on my orders for my purposes is not simply tedious, not just inconvenient, it is a personal affront. At first the buck’s failure is an offense against practicality. But in no time his failure to act on the biological imperative takes on more cosmic dimensions. When the offense is merely temporal, the sand-colored buck is a dullard in my eyes, too dim to keep to my schedule. I view his overeager ministrations as ham-handed, his failed attempts at seduction as sloppy and uncreative at their core. As his early-morning flameouts begin to gnaw at the universal fabric, his inability to deliver on his species’ fecund promise seems unnatural, possibly venal. I despair of the sand-colored buck’s failures and promptly take them on as my own.
All things in nature move from order to chaos. That’s all entropy really is. The speed with which something makes this transition is a function of its multiplicity. It is much easier to roll a seven with a pair of dice (one chance in six) than it is to roll a two (just one chance in thirty-six), thus rolling a seven has a higher multiplicity. The more opportunities a subject has to move toward chaos, the faster it will arrive; multiplicity is a predictor of the entropic character of everything. I know what this says about me. I think that I understand what this says about my Flemish giants. I am mistaken.
Hard work is a tonic. One job in particular, mucking out each stall in the hutch, is less a chore than uninterruptible drudgery. Mucking out keeps you perpetually busy while yielding no durable gain. It is a skill that plateaus very early. The cages are never so clean that the very next morning they don’t need immediate attention. Work, life really, on The Farm changes shape and purpose, but rather than change The Farm with work, it is changing me. I no longer strain to fill the space I imagined for The Farm; the force I exert achieves the opposite result. And then, two weeks after the arrival of the last of six rabbits, Doe #2, the white one, dies of a maggot infestation known as fly-strike. She dies because, in my ignorance, I have allowed her to kick over her water dish and sit in the water. I didn’t realize that wet rabbit fur in combination with a healthy measure of dung and a little chemical lime (sprinkled in the cages per instructions of one of the first breeders I speak with, to keep the cages sanitary between daily cleanings) creates the perfect condition for flies to lay their eggs (a fly lays eggs an average of fourteen times every summer day). The eggs hatch and the maggots make their way to the warmest, wettest food source and begin to feast. The maggots travel as they feast. It just gets warmer and wetter the farther up the rabbit they range. This is the horror of fly-strike.
I discover the infestation quite by accident. While returning Doe #2 to her cage after yet another failed breeding session, I turn her on her back in my arms, half expecting her to present like a Barbie doll. Having no genitalia at all would have been only half as convincing an explanation of the failure to breed as what I discovered when I brushed her somewhat matted fur aside.
Eggs laid on a rabbit’s nethers in the morning will hatch by lunchtime, and the army of maggots that results begins to eat immediately, causing wounds and releasing toxins not only on the surface of the skin but inside the animal’s reproductive and digestive tract. The infestation is deadly within days and within hours is too hideous to examine closely. Most all veterinarians understand how fast-moving this infestation is, but I do not. Rather than expose myself as a neglectful rabbit keeper, I opted to treat her myself. I carry her into the kitchen immediately, where I make her a comfy nest from brightly colored beach towels; following website instructions I apply a variety of medicines. The children are delighted to have the rabbit in the house and pretend not to notice my distress when they play with her. I am ashamed of my failure to take Doe #2 to a trained professional. I convince myself that the children’s boundless affection will help cure the doe faster than any antiseptic veterinary clinic might. Lisa understands that the perfect white doe is very sick, but also seems to have faith that I am providing a cure. She believes that my newfound concern for this one doe, my constant fussing and ministering, means that the worst of my agrarian role play is finally at an end, that my behavior heralds a return to sanity, and that this increasingly dark pantomime is nearly over.
I know that my ministrations are having little and probably no effect. It is impossible to completely clear this doe of maggots. Believing I have, I leave her alone for just an hour; the infestation is robust again when I flip her over to check on my work. I let Heath name the doe Snow White, and for two days she spends hours feeding the doe carrots. Bevan Jake enjoys enthusiastically hugging the sick rabbit. The idea that he is both increasing what must be her blinding agony and unintentionally squeezing the infestation into his own lap so repulses me that I ban him, clueless as to what he has done to inspire my anger, from the kitchen.
I spend two full days trying to save Doe #2. During the evening of the second day I commit to putting the rabbit out of her misery the next morning, immediately after dropping the kids at school. I return home, grim and determined. But Doe #2 lies dead on the kitchen floor where I have been ministering to her.
I hate my cowardice, my inability to have ended her suffering, the casual way I chose to put off doing the right, if unpleasant, thing the moment I knew there was no saving her. I stuff her heavy carcass in a plastic garbage bag, cover her with a scoop of lime (calcium hydroxide; the alkaline dust speeds decomposition and masks the sm
ell of rotting flesh), and throw her in the trash. Pickup day is tomorrow.
In a terse e-mail to Lisa at work I write, Snow White is dead.
I hear nothing from Lisa until 3 p.m., when she sends me an e-mail informing me that she has been asked to drinks by a client and cannot refuse. She asks me to kiss the kids good-night for her. She will be late, she writes, no need to wait up for her.
I stay up half the night all the same, fixating on how to provide water to the animals in a way that will not allow them to harm themselves. Two hours after Lisa wordlessly joins me in bed, immediately feigns sleep, and moments after that is sound asleep, I dream up an irrigation system in each cage that operates on a garden timer. A garden hose runs to the back of the hutch to a brass splitter with six spigots. A capillary system of custom-length hoses feeds blue plastic dishes that are screwed to the floor of each cage.
Try kicking that over.
The next morning I build the system that I had in the dark scribbled on the back of a magazine with a laundry marker. I calibrate the garden-hose timer to observed usage patterns. Problem solved. I replace the feed bowls with feed bins that hang through the holes cut in the wire on each cage. The floor of each cage is no longer an inadvertent death trap.
I have trouble reading the rabbits’ body language when the automatic irrigation system cranks up, but I am pleased with the automation and think of the generations of yeoman farmers before me who, inspired to solve problems, to avoid continued tragedy, or by Yankee ingenuity, must also have been seized by inspiration in the middle of the night and changed farming methods forever after.
I am alarmed to discover that, after only two days, the automatic water trough is being used as a toilet. Not by one obstinate cuss, but by all five residents of the hutch. Horrified at the health implications if the rabbits continue to hang their nethers over such a fetid stew, I disconnect the hose immediately and swab each cage with a weak bleach solution. Withholding water from the rabbits if they continue to try to kill themselves with it seems reasonable at first. Maybe I can provide water for them outside their cages, monitor their intake, and then, having judged them properly hydrated, return them to a bone-dry cage. This hardly seems in keeping with my philosophical commitment to the laborsaving device that has defined work on The Farm thus far.
In an e-mail to Sugar Ray I neglect to inform him of the demise of Doe #2. Instead I explain that, like Doe #1, the pair he just sold me will not entertain the stud buck either and that my time is running out. I blame the sand-colored buck and ask if Sugar Ray can spare any bucks to sire my herd. He has none to spare but has a friend who is selling off an American Chinchilla buck. Sugar Ray promotes the notion of hybrid vigor, scoffs at my concern that the kits won’t grow big enough, fast enough, and offers to broker the deal. In a pinch, I figure, one buck is as good as another and ask if he can spare one more doe—hopefully one much more accommodating than the freeloaders loafing around The Farm. Sugar Ray agrees. Doe #1 is looking a bit worn down. I am too embarrassed to ask him in advance to examine another breeder’s merchandise, so the morning the American Chinchilla buck arrives at Sugar Ray’s barn, I pack up Doe #1, intending to spring her on him unannounced and see what he thinks.
Sugar Ray is as excitable as ever. I am obviously vexed and insist on getting right to work, but my Rabbit Man doesn’t appear to mind. I tell him again that the rabbits aren’t doing what rabbits are famous for doing, and the breeder listens. “You can stimulate the doe with your fingers,” he offers.
“That’s completely out of the question,” I reply. If Lisa happened upon me in the barn whilst digitally stimulating a twenty-pound rabbit, I’m pretty certain she would call the locksmith and the police.
“No. It’s not bad at all,” he explains, putting his index and middle fingers parallel.
“I’m sure it isn’t. Still … ,” I protest, failing to cut short his demonstration as he reaches into a cage for a steel gray doe. I refuse to watch while he demonstrates, but he demonstrates all the same. At the first opportunity, whimpering now, I repeat that I am running out of time to produce an edible litter of kits.
“So you don’t just need a doe,” exclaims Sugar Ray, still hugging the steel gray doe. “You need a pregnant doe!”
“Yes. I suppose that’s right,” I reply gratefully, the straightforward genius of his solution washing over me as the words leave my mouth.
“Well,” Sugar Ray exclaims, “let’s go rape a rabbit, Manny.”
“That one?” I ask, regarding the digitally stimulated steel doe suspiciously.
“She’s yours now,” says Sugar Ray, strutting off to the brightest corner of the barn. He places the doe in a cage with a light gray buck, one of four in the row, all from the same litter, the breeder explains. The first buck doesn’t mount so much as pounce on my stimulated steel doe. Moments later, his work at an end, he flops over sideways off her. Unfazed, she hops over to the water bottle. “Let’s make sure this sticks,” says Sugar Ray rhetorically, sweeping the doe out of the first cage and into the neighboring confine with one motion so fluid that it seems as though he opened neither door. While the first buck looks on, his brother repeats the process. Looking hard at the first buck, I swear I can detect the instinctive fury produced by sperm competition. I look again. Nope.
A few short moments later, my stimulated steel doe is out from under the jittery buck and back in Sugar Ray’s embrace. “That is one pregnant rabbit,” he says, stroking her forehead lightly. “You wanna see the Chinchilla?”
“Sure.”
In a cage by the door sits a rabbit that at first glance I mistook for one of Sugar Ray’s kits. “He’s so small?”
“Cute, isn’t he?” Sugar Ray smiles, still holding the steel gray doe.
“He’s so small?”
“Not for an American Chinchilla, he’s not. That’s good weight.”
“Will it work? I mean, my does don’t put up with a buck four times his size,” I can hear myself moaning.
“It ought to work,” says Sugar Ray carelessly. “Always has before. Truth is, you may even get better meat once you mix ‘em up.” He’s walking to a pile of frail wooden produce boxes. He picks out two and lines them with timothy grass. While he packs the steel gray doe and the Chinchilla buck for transport, I slip out to the truck and return with Doe #1. I ask the breeder if he can cast an eye over her. “Manny, that is one old rabbit you’ve got there. Where did you get that?”
I tell him that I purchased the fetching pale-gray doe from a Central European guy in New Jersey along with my useless sand-colored buck. “Russian guy?” asks Sugar Ray.
“Sort of.”
“I know that guy,” he says skeptically, taking the doe from my arms. “His name is Jerzy or something.”
“I think that’s right.” I wonder what the chances really are that my Jersey rabbit breeder is named Jerzy.
“Hell, this isn’t even his rabbit,” exclaims the breeder, examining my pale gray doe. “This ear tattoo belongs to a friend of mine in Bridgeport. See? ‘JZ’!”
“Oh.”
“We can give it a try,” says Sugar Ray skeptically. “One of these boys might be into a little MILF action, but she’s awfully old. Just look at her.”
He turns to walk to the row of studs where we had busied ourselves with the steel gray doe. He turns to me over his shoulder as he briefly promenades the doe in front of his bucks. “What do they say about older women? Much older women?”
I brace for impact, a chimp-fear grin plastered across my face.
“‘They don’t swell, they don’t tell, and they’re grateful as hell!’”
Sugar Ray tries to mate Doe #1 with no fewer than six of his most virile bucks.
No go.
“Sorry, Manny, that is one old rabbit. She’s like a seventy-year-old person. Rabbits only have but so many eggs to fertilize. When they’re done, well, they’re done.” He draws his finger across his neck.
Spent is not how the breeder with the su
n-baked backyard hutch in New Jersey described the doe when he sold her to me. Rather I was buying “an experienced mother who will take great care of her litter.”
The claim impressed me at the time, even more so after I see how barbarically some does treat their first litters.
Upon my return from Litchfield, Lisa and I promote Doe #1 to house pet. I do not explore why I consider her departing The Farm a promotion, but with the elevation of station comes a name; we begin to refer to her reverentially as The Old Gray Lady. Lisa, Heath, and Bevan Jake embrace The Old Gray Lady. Watching the kids snuggle a rabbit almost their size is bizarre, but she is always gentle, serene. Lisa and the kids allow her to roam on the porch and sometimes in the kitchen, though she doesn’t move around too much. She seems content. They fall in love with her.
The Old Gray Lady dies of something two weeks later.
I put her corpse in the freezer in the barn, and when Lisa notices her absence a few days later, I inform her that her favorite rabbit is dead, explain that, rather than liming her in a garbage bag and putting her at the curb on pickup day as I had done with Doe #2, I have wrapped her carefully and stored her in the garage freezer in case Lisa wants us to bury her out back. Lisa looks at me, wordless for a long moment, says “No,” and goes back inside. I don’t see Lisa again for a few days. She avoids me around the house and won’t let the kids play with the rabbits anymore. When I finally confront her one morning before work, she has tears in her eyes and tells me she can’t live in this mess. She doesn’t wait for my response before she opens the door and leaves for work.
TAKING FROM TRESPASSER
Sitting on an upturned five-gallon, white plastic bucket watching the riot of squirrels in the canopy behind the house, I am seized with dread. Those squirrels are just waiting to sack the garden. Why haven’t I seen this obvious disaster? I’ll never see a single vegetable from the garden, never mind eat one, if this tree-borne horde of vermin lays siege. The Internet conjures an exciting and diverse array of antisquirrel devices, but the solution to this problem can’t be put off for overnight delivery. Though by the time I locate a nearby squirrel-trap vendor and set off for Staten Island, I might as well have ordered online and waited for next-day delivery.
